read, write, ramble

It’s time to make (another) stand against inertia and try and make some concrete progress towards getting something substantial published. Now, stay right there while I make another cuppa, grab a biscuit, catch up on the latest telly, read the news …

Still there? Good. Few of you will know that I’ve had a short story collection in the works for far too many years. This will comprise all of my currently published stories (with a minor spruce-up) along with a bunch of new short stories, some ‘behind the scenes’ material and … no, wait – that’s everything.

In total the book will feature thirteen stories. Twelve of these are written (one or two in need of a further draft, but nothing game-changing). The final story is the one that’s keeping this collection off the shelves. All in all I’ve been working on it for nearly 20 months (on and off).

This week I’ll be making a major effort to get the first draft completed, and thereby take a major step towards getting my collection published. The story is about 15,000 at present; I expect it to be around 20,000 complete. I have four major scenes to get through, each of which has been sketchily plotted, but not in nearly as much detail as I like.

The plan is to write one scene each day, Monday to Thursday, putting the plot together during my lunch break and then hammering out the words in that narrow evening space between the kids going to bed and me finally succumbing to the call of bedthulhu.

Of course, even if I can complete the challenge the story won’t be anywhere near publishable, but at least it will be mostly on the page instead of mostly in my head.